Daniel Ortega, in full José Daniel Ortega Saavedra (born November 11, 1945, La Libertad, Nicaragua) Nicaraguan guerrilla leader, member of the Sandinista junta that took power in 1979, and the elected president of Nicaragua (1984–90, 2007– ).

Daniel Ortega, 2006.

Yuri Cortez—AFP/Getty Images

Son of a veteran of the peasant army of César Augusto Sandino, Ortega moved with his family to Managua in the mid-1950s. He briefly attended the Central American University in Managua, then in 1963 he went underground and became a member of the SandinistaNational Liberation Front (FSLN). By 1967 he was in charge of the FSLN’s urban resistance campaign against the ruling Somoza family.

In the fall of 1967 Ortega was arrested for his part in a bank robbery and spent the next seven years in jail. He and a number of other Sandinista prisoners were released at the end of 1974 in exchange for high-level Somocista hostages. Ortega, with the other released prisoners, was exiled to Cuba, where he received several months of guerrilla training. After secretly returning to Nicaragua, Ortega played a major role in the conciliation of various FSLN factions and in the formation of alliances with business and political groups. This policy gradually turned the guerrilla campaign into a full-fledged civil war and led to the Sandinista victory in 1979.

One of the five members of the Sandinista junta, Ortega was named coordinator of the junta in 1981 and three years later was elected president of Nicaragua. He was defeated in his bid for reelection in 1990 by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the candidate of the National Opposition Union. Chamorro’s term expired in 1996. Ortega reemerged as the FSLN candidate for president in May 1996 but was defeated in the October election by conservative candidate Arnoldo Alemán Lacayo. Ortega was also the FSLN candidate for president in 2001, and although he was defeated, he captured 42 percent of the vote.

Ortega remained influential in Nicaraguan politics, and in 2006 he once again ran for president as the FSLN’s candidate. With strong support among Nicaragua’s poor, he secured a large enough plurality to defeat conservative candidate Eduardo Montealegre. Ortega took office in January 2007, and, during his first months as president, it seemed to many that he had carried out his inaugural promises of implementing programs to eliminate hunger and illiteracy among the country’s impoverished, of maintaining a free-trade agreement with the United States, and of creating more private-sector jobs. But, after his first year in office, Ortega’s critics questioned his motives when he began restricting news coverage, denying journalists access to government reports, and aligning himself with leftist Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez.

Through the Chávez regime’s PetroCaribeinitiative, Nicaragua, like a number of other countries in the Caribbean region, received oil from Venezuela at discounted prices, which it then resold at market prices. Ortega’s government used much of the profits on additional social programs that helped reduce poverty. Indeed, according to one measure, general poverty in Nicaragua fell from about 42 percent of the population to about 30 percent during 2009–14. During the same period—largely as a result of Venezuela’s help, aid from international financial organizations, diversified maquiladora production, strong agricultural and mining exports, and rising cash remittances from abroad—the Nicaraguan economy began taking big steps in the right direction, with unemployment falling to about 7 percent, whereas GDP growth climbed to 6 percent in 2011 before falling to about 4 percent in 2015.

In July 2009, on the 30th anniversary of the FSLN revolution, Ortega announced his intention to amend the constitution so that the president could be reelected to a second, consecutive term. In October, in response to a petition from Ortega and more than 100 mayors, the Nicaraguan Supreme Court lifted the constitutional ban on consecutive reelection, allowing Ortega to run in the country’s 2011 presidential election. In the event, Ortega won reelection with some 60 percent of the vote, though there were allegations of election fraud. Meanwhile, the FSLN established a “supermajority” by winning 62 of 90 seats in the National Assembly, clearing the way for Sandinistas to advance their legislative agenda.

While Ortega remained popular with disadvantaged Nicaraguans, it was a different matter with the middle class, who became disenchanted with what they saw as his increasingly authoritarian rule and with the lack of transparency of his government. Critics of the Ortega regime were also quick to point out that some of the profits from Venezuelan oil money had been invested in private companies that were controlled by Ortega’s family and friends, whose conspicuousconsumption, the opposition argued, looked a lot like that of the Somoza family. Ortega also remained a steadfast supporter of the Venezuelan government—headed by Nicolás Maduro since the death of Chávez—even after Venezuela’s economy plummeted into crisis in response to falling world oil prices. Despite these developments, the opposition remained fragmented, and the FSLN, using its supermajority, pushed through changes to the constitution that removed term limits on the presidency and increased the chief executive’s power to rule by decree. As a result, Ortega was able to run for a third term in November 2016 with his wife, Rosario Murillo, the government’s chief spokesperson, as his vice presidential running mate. In the event, Ortega won a commanding victory, capturing more than 72 percent of the vote, though the election was boycotted by many in the opposition and was not witnessed by international observers (who were uninvited by the government).

Learn More in these related articles:

The U.S. conflict with the Nicaraguan revolutionary regime of Daniel Ortega also reached a climax in 1989. On February 14 five Central American presidents, inspired by the earlier initiatives of the Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace laureate Óscar Arias Sánchez, agreed to plans for a cease-fire in the entire region, the closing of Contra bases in Honduras, and monitored...

in Nicaragua

On November 4, 1984, the FSLN and its presidential candidate, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, won 63 percent of the vote in an election that international observer teams deemed fair. Ortega was inaugurated in January 1985, and two years later the new Constituent Assembly produced a constitution that called for regularly held elections, the first for national office to take place in 1990.

...was established in the early 1960s as a guerrilla group dedicated to the overthrow of the Somoza family. They governed Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990 and again starting in 2006 when Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega won in the general elections of that year. Presidential candidates must receive at least 40 percent of the vote or have 35 percent of the vote and be at least 5 percentage points ahead...

External Links

Britannica Web sites

(born 1945). A member of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), Daniel Ortega served as Nicaragua’s president from 1984 to 1990 and again from 2007. His 2006 presidential campaign used the slogan "Peace, jobs, and reconciliation." During the campaign Ortega backed a law to outlaw abortion under any circumstances, apologized for his "excesses" during the 1980s, promised to uphold international financial and trade agreements, and vowed not to engage in war.